[CM] question on audio distributions, CCRMA or Agnula, others?

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Rick Taube wrote:

> I have the agnula distro (with fluxbox not gnome) running on a machine 
> in my office. it was a snap to install and it has been very stable, i 
> recommend it except for fluxbox itself. if i installed it again i'd 
> use the gnome version.
>
> On Feb 28, 2005, at 7:04 PM, Chris Dawson wrote:
>
>> This is not directly related to CM, so if people wish to answer 
>> offline, that is definitely acceptable.  I am about to install a new 
>> distro on my desktop, and would like advice about which 
>> audio-optimized distribution people are using.  I suspect CCRMA is 
>> what most will recommend since it is developed IIRC by the same 
>> people who do CM, but does anyone feel happy using Agnula, for 
>> example, or audioslack?  I personally try to stay away from RedHat, 
>> and though Fedora is better, I would definitely prefer a debian based 
>> distro.  I'll prepare myself for the flames...
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Chris
>>
>> -- 
>> linux hacker
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Cmdist mailing list
>> Cmdist@ccrma.stanford.edu
>> http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/cmdist
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Cmdist mailing list
> Cmdist@ccrma.stanford.edu
> http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/cmdist
>
I tried AgNuLa briefly when it first came out. They used to have two 
flavors, DeMuDi (Debian-based) and ReMuDi (Red Hat based) but they may 
have dropped the Red Hat flavor. In any event, I'm not sure they have 
packages for any of the CCRMA tools (like CM); you'd need to get ".deb" 
packages from somewhere or build them from source. I have never done 
anything with Audioslack.

Most of my machines are running a mix of audio and other software; I 
don't have one machine "dedicated" to audio. I have one that's running 
Debian "sarge", one dual-booted Windows and Gentoo, one dual-booted 
Fedora Core 3 and Gentoo, and one pure Gentoo. I haven't done much with 
the Fedora Core 3 partition; I set that up just as a learning tool for 
certification exams rather than as a serious workstation or server. And 
the one that's running "sarge" is only running "sarge" because the hard 
drive is a tad small for Gentoo, which caches all the packages in source 
form, yielding a fairly large "/usr" directory.

What I have seen of AgNuLa (the Debian flavor) is quite impressive. I 
don't particularly like either Gnome or fluxbox, but KDE is too 
heavyweight for some of the real-time work, and even if you don't load 
Gnome, a lot of it gets installed anyway, because a number of packages 
depend on big chunks of it. You can load anything in the Debian 
repositories on a DeMuDi system. If I had a dedicated audio system, it 
would be my distro of choice for that system.